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Yaaarrrrr! Avast ye scallywags! This be the home of The Evil Fleet. The gaming group dedicated to bringing ye the best games possible! Check out our latest news below to see what evil plans we be brewin'.
The Evil Fleet has arrived, prepare to be boarded!

First day at Gen Con! Most of us showed up today to get ready for our starting events tomorrow. Joe and I (Dave Cabrera) actually came into town yesterday but we didn’t do anything special other than eat FANTASTIC steaks at St. Elmo’s and spend some time down at the pool.

This year our numbers would be thinned a bit. Due to conflicts with business responsibilities, Bill Maddocks would not be in attendance this year. So for our first official night in it appeared that the only ones going to our annual Buca di Beppo’s, Wednesday night dinner were going to be Dave Wulatin, Judith, Joe and myself. Then at the last moment I got a call from Dave Scheftel. He and his daughter Matilda would be coming up that night and wanted to join us for dinner. Due to personal reasons Dave has been out of the game running at Gen Con for the last 2 years. He’s come to Gen Con for a couple of days to expose his daughter to the convention the last couple of years but hasn’t been up this early since 2008. So it was a pleasant surprise to have him and Matilda join us again!

As usual the food and service were great.For our appetizer we had; Cheesy Garlic Bread.

After we ate until we could eat no more, most of us passed on dessert. However Matilda found the strength to have a slice of Cheese Cake. It looked so good that her dad said it was so big that he thought he would need to help her. Yeah right! I got to take home a couple of Bucca souvenir glasses from the large beers I had. Only got 2 though. I’ll have to go back and try for a set of like 6.

It was a darn good meal and we finished up somewhere around 7:30pm or so. After one quick scare where I had to run back into the restaurant for my camera AGAIN (not the first time I’ve done this) we were off. I had my badge sent to me so I had everything I needed. Dave Wulatin and Judith had stopped and picked their stuff up earlier so they were done. Joe was having some trouble figuring out where his was to be picked up at and Dave Scheftel had just gotten into town before coming to dinner and had not had a chance to pick their stuff up.

I accompanied Joe, Dave and Matilda back over to the convention center to get their stuff. As I said Joe had a little difficulty figuring out where his was supposed to be so I left him alone to figure out what he needed to do. I headed over to Dave and Matilda who had headed over to the ‘Will Call’ line. OMG! The ‘Will Call’ line stretched all the way from the cab drop-off, underpass (where it usually starts), almost all the way down to the back end of the building. I joined Dave and Matilda right around Exhibit Hall B, which if you’ve been there you know is pretty far down. The line took something like an hour and half to get through. Say what they want, something is clearly broken here.

If the concept of going to Pre-Reg is to save some money ($10?) my vote would be it’s not worth it. The buy on site was like 5 mins. Now those time frames may change drastically as the convention goes on, that will not change the experience that most people had. I predict a lot less Pre-Reg next year and a lot more picking up badges there. Or at the least a lot more people having their badges mailed to them.

To their credit the line looked like it was going to take about 3 hours to get through and as I said it only took about 1 ½ hours. Although I did see them close the line at one point and turn away anyone else from getting in the line. I think Thursday is gonna be a mess.

We all headed our separate ways and went to get some sleep. Joe and Dave Wulatin both had a couple of events to run Thursday and I had to run Bill’s ‘Heart of Darkness’.

We've been doing this for so long that we have a huge number of old characters. While we will have many new ones this year, we won't have enough for all of the players. To assist players who will play an older character, we've made a list of all the old characters we still have in circulation, along with a brief description of each. The list also indicates which characters can be "shared" by two players. Hope this helps get your taunt juices flowing!

So we’re gearing up here at The Evil Fleet for this year’s Gen Con events. Once again we are running a variety of games. We brought back most of our long running games by our veteran GMs Dave Wulatin and Joe L. as well as our yearly dose of horror done Evil Fleet style.So without further delay, I give you our events for Gen Con 2011!

Can of Whupass 2011: A Triskaidekaphobic's Baker's Dozen of Olivia Wilde!Why, yes. It IS our 13th year of running our signature event at Gen Con! Pop culture and gaming icons duke it out in the ring. It's the only slugfest where good roleplaying increases your chances to win! The only game with cool prizes for all players! The only game with color commentary by Triumph and Dr. Phil! It's almost as much fun to watch as it is to play, so stop by and see why so many call this "The Best Event at Gen Con!"

Our second longest running event run by Dave Wulatin:

Paranoia Trek X: Nemesi?...Nemesises?...Lots of Traitors!Greetings, FED Sector Troubleshooters! Congratulations on surviving Jimm-Y-KRK, the Rash-U-KHN, a missing clone search, time travel, [classified], a Klin-G-ONN negotiation, a new clone generation, more time travel, and immortal INFRAREDs. Please complete your 10 yearcycle mission: to exhaust old plots, to pay lip service to source material, to boldly hammer the final nail before the reboot. That is all. The Computer is your friend.

There will be two sessions of this event.

Joe Linehan brings his unique twist-tie miniature JSA back for another fun year at Gen Con:

JSA: The Return of the Per DegatonSetting the stage for Gen Con 2012’s ultimate battle, the Justice Society’s old time traveling enemy is back and determined to shape the world in his image for all time. This may be the most challenging Justice Society game yet and that’s saying something after over a decade of serving up justice Golden Age style!

This event also will have two sessions.

Joe Linehan’s All-Thrills Campaign features continuity and consequences without 30 pages of reading what happened at Gen Con 2007:

All-Thrills 1954: Bitter FruitIn our 6th adventure, the heroes exiled from the United States, travel to South America where they confront a new enemy with a familiar connection to their past. The decisions they make will forever alter their world. This game features public access Golden Age heroes in a post World War II world with a grayer morality. We have six years of rich campaign history, but back story is kept to a page.

Joe Linehan is at it again with another comedy game:

Power Corps: Grand Rapids 2: Downsize ThisBeing a corporate superhero is tough enough without an economic recession. Will the team be downsized? Will they merged with Power Corps: Lansing? Utility Belts are for closers in this lighthearted Champions game designed for new and experienced Hero System players alike. The Office meets Justice League International in a game with both laughs and thrills.

And one more from the most prolific Joe Linehan:

Slaves of The Murder EmperorA vile new enemy knows everybody’s darkest secrets and is using them to spread a cloud of death over Chicago. Only a handful of the city’s heroes can stand against this menace, but even they may not be enough to stop The Murder Emperor! Two-fisted pulp action inspired by heroes like The Spider and The Shadow.

Once again The Evil Fleet steps into the darker side of horror with a redux of Bill Maddock’s 2004 Call of Cthulhu event:

Heart of Darkness1890: The Belgian Congo! Africa at last! The vast plains, the exotic creatures, the disease..oh my. You plunge headlong down the Congo River deep into the African bush in search of the renegade Colonel Kurtz. Hey, somebody should make a movie about this! Hmmm, What the hell it’s Call of Cthulhu! What more do you want?

Horror rears its ugly head again in Dave Cabrera’s Call of Cthulhu event:

Cajun ChaosThe American Civil War. Blue Vs Grey. Brother against Brother. The War Between the States. It was the deadliest war in American history which held the nation in a grip of terror. But it only scratched the surface of terror. Trapped behind enemy lines, lost in the Bayous of Louisiana and running for their lives, these surviving Union troops must escape before they fall prey to the Rebel forces. That’s the least of their problems. Seems Terror has decided to scratch back.

Eight events this year with two of those events running twice for a total of ten sessions. We have plans for lots of fun, surprises and excitement. We'll be updating with more information as it becomes available so check back in for an update

Sunday. The final wrap-up for The Evil Fleet at Gen Con 2010. We didn’t run any events on Sunday so there wasn’t anything for us to do or prepare for except going home. There is a bid of ‘sadness’ when it comes to Sunday because it means the end of a great week spent together doing the things we like to do most. I’m sure this is feeling shared by many gamers at the end of the Con.

The only thing positive about it, is we know we ran excellent events this year. The smiles and laughter of our players at the end of our events is the proof for us. Our players would stick around after the events were over and ask us questions like; ‘What was your inspiration for this event? How do we prepare for them? How did we accomplish this little bit of presentation? Who are you guys?’ And feedback. We love that. They would tell us what they liked, what they thought would be better and what they really loved! For us, getting that feedback has always helped us run better events and put on better shows for our players. We had over 100 players for all of our events combined. What a rush!

Our final official thing was to get together at Hooters and have our annual, end of the Con lunch. Much as we did at our lunch on Saturday we talked about what was our best parts, highlights of this Con and what were thinking about doing next year.

As usual Bill, Joe, Dave Wulatin and I were joined by Judith for lunch. We also meet up with Mark and Tim, two of our home role-playing group who also played in ‘Can of Whupass’. It was a great lunch and we all had stories to pass on to each other. But like all good things it must come to an end. We finished up lunch and headed home with the vow that we would return next year with more of the best games we could come up with.

Saturday was again light for us as we only had two events too run. However one was our annual ‘Can of Whupass’, our single biggest event.

Joe started off running his event ‘Power Core: Grand Rapids’ at 8am. Man likes his early starts I guess. He said the event went very well and he was happy with how it turned out. He finished up with the event around noon and headed back to the hotel to rest up before ‘Can of Whupass’ that night.

Because none of us were running any events that afternoon we decided to meet for a late lunch. We were all staying at the Home Wood Suites so we tried the sports bar on the corner named ‘Kilroy’s’ on the recommendation of one of our bellboys. It was Joe, Bill, Dave Wulatin and my self in attendance. Good call on his part as the food was excellent. Great new place for us to dine at in the future. We sat around and went over some of the highlights of our events. At this point I think we all pretty much agreed this was turning out to be one of our best Gen Cons ever. All the events had run smoothly up to that point. All events were sold out with full groups. The groups all enjoyed their selves very much and we had lots of them ask about getting on a mailing list. All the things that we run our events for were rolling out of our events this year. We were on a bit of a GMs high. Already we started saying “Next year I’m going to run……..” It’s a great feeling!

After lunch we headed back to our rooms to rest up and prepare for our big event. We headed down stairs around 5:30pm to be sure to be ready for our 7pm start. It took us about 10 minutes to get everything, and there was a lot, packed into Judith’s car to take over to the Hyatt. Dave Wulatin headed over on foot to set up some help to get the stuff up to the room, while Judith and I drove over with all the goodies needed to run a ‘Can of Whupass’. Bill and Joe followed over in a cab. We all converged on the Hyatt at about the same time and soon had our stuff unloaded and heading up to the room in the elevator.

Dave Wulatin was already there and we were going to have the room to ourselves tonight. Because of the size of our event Gen Con gave us the entire room of four tables for the rest of the night. No other events were scheduled but there were two pick up groups running in there. We politely told them that we would be using the entire room tonight and we needed about an hour to set up. They finished up what they could of their events and moved over to one of the other rooms that had open tables to finish the rest. When all is said and done at a ‘Can of Whupass’ we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 35-50 people in the room. No GM wants to put up with the kind of noise we make. We always warn others about that so they have an option to move if they want. Usually they do. Gamers are great anyway and most of the time they completely understand and move to another location. To all those who do, we like to say Thank You!

It took us a little while to get set up but with everyone working together and even some of our returning past players pitching in to help we were set up in no time. It was like watching a well orchestrated scene change in a play. One second it was just four empty tables in a conference room, the next it was the setting for ‘Can of Whupass 2010: Pants on The Ground’.

While we consider ‘Can of Whupass’ our baby, in truth Dave Wulatin is the heart and soul of the game. The original premise was Dave’s, he comes up with all of the characters and does all the leg work preparing for this event all year. The only other person who does as much as Dave, if not more, is Judith. If it wasn’t for Judith’s incredible organizational skills and her ability to keep things running smoothly from behind the scenes, ‘Can of Whupass’ would be something akin to a time-bomb about to explode. Judith runs around and does more on that night than any one single other member of Evil Fleet. But we all do pitch in and Bill and Joe jumped in on the set up as well. They then settled in to do their play-by-play commentary for the event as Dr. Phil (Joe) and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (Bill). Between their impromptu jokes and antics and some scripted out skits, Joe and Bill keep the players in stitches. And finally I throw in with the setup, muscle work and video taping/photo taking of the event.

We were slotted for 25 players and actually we had 27 characters play in this year’s event. Some of those characters were shared characters so I think in all we had something like 33 players. What a sight! ‘Can of Whupass’ tends to bring out some of the best gamers/taunters/players at the Con. This year was no exception. As the night wears on it becomes harder and harder to taunt your opponent so we will sometimes suspend the taunts and go just with the battles. This was not the case for 2010. The taunts were great and they just kept coming ALL night long. As the players got eliminated they were able to choose the prizes they wanted from our ‘Prize Box’. Truth be told, our prize box was something actually like 8 boxes. I think the count of prizes we let each player take this year was 6 items each. Man we had a lot of stuff.

The players were great with their roleplaying, taunting and leading a helping hand. In the end there could only be one winner of ‘Can of Whupass’. And that winner was Brad Torres. Brad did an incredible job taunting his fellow players with his ‘Walken, Texas Ranger’, most of which brought uncontrollable laughter to the other players. Brad does a great job every year taunting and has won our ‘Best Taunter’ award before. This year was no exception Brad won both the main event and ‘Best Taunter’. Congratulations Brad! A well deserved win!

Of course if you’re gonna win ‘Can of Whupass’, well every king needs to be crowned…….in Silly String.

To say that we had a great event would be an understatement of galactic proportions. It was out of this world with some amazing taunts from veteran taunters and newbies alike. It was a hell of an event and with this wrapping up the last of our events for Gen Con we are definitely able to say this was our best Gen Con ever!

Friday was a much lighter day for us. We only ran two events but one of them was just plan ‘monstrous’. Joe ran his yearly JSA vs event while Dave Wulatin and I ran my Call of Cthulhu event.

Joe didn’t start his event until noon today which was good because of the size of the event. Early events some players can decide not to go depending on how their events went the night before and his event was slotted for 18 players! As it turns out someone wanted to get in on the action so Joe let him in with generics. So the grand total of players for Joe’s event was 19! Wow! Joe’s a veteran GM and he handled it beautifully. This years’ event was ‘JSA vs. Cthulhu’.

Joe’s ‘JSA vs.’ game utilizes his very unique ‘twist tie superheroes’. These are one of a kind, hand-made miniatures of DC’s greatest heroes. Joe combined these minis, the Wizkid’s Call of Cthulhu large figure and scenery/buildings that he and Bill made. Bill had a big hand in putting the buildings together and they looked great. I went with Joe to help set up on that Friday morning for his noon start. The final set up was awesome. Here’s a photo.

I left before the start and Joe was set to run the event by himself. With 19 players he was going to have his hands full but Joe rose to the occasion and came through with flying colors. Joe said it was awesome and everyone had a great time. Joe finished of his day with a nice lunch and resting by the pool in our hotel.

Meanwhile Dave Wulatin took the opportunity to have Wil Wheaton, one of the media stars at Gen Con this year, sign his Wesle-Y-KID character name-plaque he uses for his Paranoia Trek event. Nice little touch for someone to have on their name-plaque in the future.

The only other event we were to run today was my Call of Cthulhu, ‘Unnameable Basterds’ at 6pm. We had the event slotted for six players but I always make sure I have a couple of extra characters made up in case someone else wants to try and get in. It was a good thing too because we did have a couple of extra and we ended up having a full group of eight.

To say that the event went well is an understatement. It was phenomenal! I could not have asked for a better bunch of players. They played their characters beautifully and I had as much fun watching them as they had playing in the event. Here’s a photo of the group, they even hammed it up for the photo!

We added some extra sound affects in this year and used an actress that Dave Wulatin knows from his High

School years. Her name is Angie Louise and she did an incredible job with the sound affects for us. (Click here for her website) Thanks Angie!

As usual Dave Wulatin did a great job of helping Co-GMing the event. His surprise blood squib in the mouth made a big impact on the players.

It was a great event and it made me very glad, as it does every year, that I run an event.

We finished and wrapped up just about midnight and Dave and I heading back to our hotel. We had a great time and my Call of Cthulhu was a big success and hit. Off to our rooms we headed. We had one more day of events to run with our biggest event ‘Can of Whupass’ yet to come on Saturday night.

So the first day of running events for us. This was the day most of our events ran. We had a total of four different running today with one of those events running twice. What was really nice is that working with Gen Con and communicating back and forth with them we ended up all having our events in the same room for the entire convention. We had our events in Studio 6 of the Hyatt which is a small room in the corner by the elevators on the third floor. That room is great! It’s small so you don’t have to worry about trying to run your event over nine other tables. For our needs, fits just perfect. This is the second year in a row we have been fortunate enough to have our events there.

Joe started the day off early with an 8am running of his Heroes System, ‘Hell’s Pawnbreaker’. Joe said he had a good running. Joe thought he went a little heavy on the Role-Playing so he had to cut the final battle a little short but was able to finish up with no problems. Joe finished up around noon just about the time Dave Wulatin was running his first event of the day.

Meanwhile other members of The Evil Fleet (Bill and I) took in some shopping time in the old dealer’s room. As always there is way too much to see and buy, which of course being good gamers we felt obligated to due just that. We also got to see Dave Scheftel there as he came in that morning with his daughter. We like to start them off early in the Fleet!

At noon Dave Wulatin ran his first session of ‘Paranoia Trek IX: The Shangr-I-LAA Ripoff.’ Dave said he had a great run and I stopped buy and watched for a few minutes. His players were laughing and going along with the jokes and rolling along with the Role-Playing. Even took a few photos. Looks like the sock-puppets were a big hit again this year!

This was the first running of his event which finished up around 4pm. He had a second running of the same event at 7pm so it gave him a little time to go and have lunch and settle back for a little bit with his wife Judith.

We did have a little scare as Dave forgot to have back up character sheets on hand for the second running and one of his players took one of the character sheets. Fortunately we were able to use Bill’s laptop and had a new character sheet written up, printed and ready for him. We may hit a bump in the road every now and then but we do a pretty good job overcoming adversities!

Next event to run for the evening was Bill’s Call of Cthulhu, ‘Ice Station Omega.’ This was actually a redux for us as Bill and I ran this way back in 2003. We started off a little slow but ended with a bang! Final battle had Bill and I both on our feet directing the players as to what was happening in the battle. Turned out to be a very good running at the end. We had a lot of great players which made the event even better. We had a six hour slot but finished up a bit early. We were wrapped up and out of there by 10:30pm.

At 7pm Joe ran his second event of the con, Champions ‘All-Thrills Comics 1953’. Joe said he intended his ‘All-Thrills’ to be a little lighter than in the past with less deadly combat then in past years. Turns out he was wrong. Almost lost a character this year, but everything came out ok and Joe say over all it went really well. He was very happy with the way it ran.

Dave Wulatin also came back at 7pm to run his second session of ‘Paranoia Trek IX: The Shangr-I-LAA Ripoff.’ Again he had a great run and I could see him at the next table over from our event keeping his players in stitches. Although it seems he had some great players too as one of them started singing in Klingon! Only at Gen Con. Ran over and snapped a few photos again when he was doing the sock-puppet bit. They’re always a hit!

Dave also used prop toy cars for his two sessions which I was only too happy to lend him.

Dave said both his runnings went great. He was completely happy with the outcome(s).

I think the best part of this day was at one time all four of us were running events at the same time in the same room. Gave it a real feeling of a well organized group. It was for myself the best part of the day. At that moment in time between our three games running we had full tables for each event so we were servicing 21 players total. It was a good feeling and lets us remember why we run the events. Not just for ourselves but more for the players.

Everyone was wrapped up by 1am and we all headed back to our rooms for some much needed rest. Friday would bring another round of games for us and we wanted to be fresh for the players. Thursday turned out to be a pretty good day of games for The Evil Fleet!